London Canal Museum — Carlo Gatti's Ice Wells

The Carlo Gatti Ice Wells at the London Canal Museum are two 19th-century brick-lined pits, 30 feet wide and 42 feet deep, that remain Europe's only visible commercial-scale ice storage wells. Built between 1862 and 1863 near London's Regent's Canal, they stored imported Norwegian lake ice for Carlo Gatti's ice cream trade. Gatti sold up to 10,000 penny ices daily by 1858 before the wells were sealed and rediscovered in the 1980s.

London · from the walk “Steam, Soot & Steel: London's Industrial Revolution” · Generated

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London Canal Museum, 12-13 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RT

How large are Carlo Gatti's ice wells at the London Canal Museum?

Right beneath your feet... there are two enormous holes in the ground. Thirty feet wide. Forty-two feet deep. Brick-lined pits plunging into the London clay like industrial cathedrals turned upside down. Welcome to one of the most extraordinary hidden relics of the Industrial Revolution.

This building was constructed between eighteen sixty-two and eighteen sixty-three as an ice warehouse. The ice wells beneath it were built for Carlo Gatti, an immigrant from Switzerland who came to London to make his fortune... and did so.

But here's the thing. Gatti was born in eighteen seventeen in a tiny mountain village in the Blenio Valley, in Ticino — one of the poorest corners of Switzerland. He was a terrible student who earned frequent canings from the village schoolmaster. And yet this man would become the uncrowned Ice King of London.

He arrived in London in eighteen forty-seven and began selling refreshments from a stall — waffles sprinkled with sugar, and chestnuts in winter. But Gatti had bigger dreams. He sold pastries and ices in little shells. The Penny Ice caught on rapidly, and Gatti was at the forefront of selling ice cream to the ordinary man or woman, who had previously been unable to afford such a luxury.

Now think about the Scale of what happened here. In eighteen fifty-seven, the first batch — four hundred tonnes of ice cut from Norwegian lakes — arrived by sea. The boats unloaded at Limehouse Basin, and horse-drawn canal barges brought the ice along the Regent's Canal to Battlebridge Basin, right outside this building. Two huge brick-lined wells, thirty feet in diameter and around forty-two feet deep, were packed with ice that could be stored for months, losing only about a quarter of its weight between Norway and the customer in London.

And the demand? It has been claimed that by eighteen fifty-eight, Gatti was selling up to Ten Thousand penny ices a Day. Hundreds of Italian street vendors would collect ice from Gatti's wells at dawn, mix in milk and flavorings, then wheel their carts as far as ten miles to pitches across the capital. They advertised their arrival by calling out "gelAti, Ecco un Poco!" — meaning "taste a little" — from which the famous cry "Hokey Pokey" is said to have derived.

But there's a darker chapter to this sweet story. Ice cream was served in small glass cups, and customers simply licked the cream from the cup. These glass licking cups were reused over and over again — unfortunately, often without being washed. The cups became a serious health hazard, implicated in the spread of typhoid. The penny lick was banned in London after eighteen ninety-nine due to concerns about cholera and tuberculosis.

And what happened to these enormous wells beneath us? They were filled with garden soil and debris, sealed up, and completely Forgotten... until their accidental rediscovery in the nineteen eighties. Today they are believed to be the Only commercial-scale ice wells in Europe that you can still see.

Carlo Gatti himself? He returned to Switzerland in eighteen seventy-one, leaving his businesses in the hands of family members, and died a millionaire. When he died, all his London establishments closed for the day out of respect. Not bad for a boy who once ran away from school in a Swiss mountain village... and walked all the way to Paris.

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